Old Acquaintance (1943)

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins--a pair of actresses who hated each other--re-mix their chemistry from The Old Maid in Old Acquaintance, an entertaining adaptation of John Van Druten's play. The action begins with Davis, a semi-famous author, returning to her small town and the home of old friend Hopkins. The later has opted for the settled life of husband and pregnancy, and she doesn't much hide her envy of Davis's success. Then the tables turn, as Hopkins pens a series of potboilers that sell much better than her friend-rival's. The movie keeps checking up on these two as the years pass, each wanting what the other has. It kicks around such staples as career vs. family, but what comes across most memorably in Old Acquaintance is the friendship between the two characters despite their rivalry; in that sense, the best scene in the film is the last scene. Hopkins has the flashy role, a silly ninny who seemingly never stops screeching, and Davis takes the more centered, self-effacing part. (By the way, Davis said that a scene in which she wears men's pajama tops caused a bit of a vogue at the time.) The men are in the background, although John Loder does a nice job of layering a gentle humor to Hopkins' long-suffering husband. Gig Young, in one of his earliest roles, is almost unrecognizable as a Davis paramour. Vincent Sherman (Mr. Skeffington) directed this example of the "women's picture," the kind of movie that kept Bette Davis the queen of the Warner Bros. lot. It was nicely remade by director George Cukor in 1981 as Rich and Famous, with Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen. --Robert Horton Amazon.com

"Old Acquaintance" Should Be Forgot ...

Film: **1/2 _____ DVD Transfer: ****1/2 _____ DVD Extras: ****

Through no fault of her own, "Old Acquaintance" is definitely one of Bette Davis's lesser vehicles from the late 30's through the early 1940's, certainly not up to the standards set by "Jezebel", "Dark Victory", "The Letter", "The Little Foxes", "The Man Who Came to Dinner", "Now, Voyager", "The Watch on the Rhine", and "Mr. Skeffington". In those superior films, Davis had the advantage of top flight scripts, formidable supporting casts, and superb production values in terms of directors, cinematographers, costume designers, and composers. In "Old Acquaintance", she is saddled with a sappy screenplay, a lackluster leading man (the bland John Loder), an unmanageable co-star (Miriam Hopkins who overplays her every scene to the point of embarrassment), an anachronistic wardrobe and hairstyles (in the 1924 and 1932 sequences), and unflattering camerawork by Sol Polito. Although Miss Davis tries hard, the resulting film is a tepid soap opera that drags on for what seems longer than its running time of 110 minutes.

The dreary plot follows two women (Davis and Hopkins) through 20 years of a friendship that began years earlier, in their school days. Davis has chosen a career and become a critically successful author, while Hopkins has elected to focus on her family. Naturally, both are at least a little jealous of the other, and years later, Hopkins has become a financially successful (if critically drubbed) novelist, while Davis has captured the love of Hopkins' husband and child. The two women fuss and feud, but at the end the film have predictably discovered that their friendship has triumphed over all obstacles. Pity Davis' character, winding up with an obnoxious (w)itch like Hopkins as the screen fades to black!

The DVD transfer of this minor melodrama is pretty good, with a generally sharp picture and a crisp soundtrack. The original theatrical trailer is included and looks great. There's also a featurette on the film in which a number of fine film historians try (unconvincingly) to lend the film an importance which it simply doesn't deserve. The 1943 short film, "Stars on Horseback" is pretty awful, implying that old feature film footage of Davis jumping hurdles in 1939's "Dark Victory" was just shot recently at the actress's home, but the vintage cartoon on the disc, "Fin 'n Catty", is a whimsical treat.

"Old Acquaintance" is the weakest entry in Warner Brothers' "Bette Davis Collection, Volume 2" ... acceptable as part of the set, but hardly worth purchasing separately. May 8, 2008

Not spectacular, but worth getting acquainted with

Not a bad little movie, though it sometimes moves uneasily between drama and comedy. For example, there's one scene where Bette Davis is vigorously shaking Miriam Hopkins in frustration, and though what we're seeing is undeniably shocking and violent, the cutesy music on the soundtrack is trying to tell us it's supposed to be funny. But, all in all, "Old Acquaintance" is a watchable, mostly polished affair, though it's certainly not up there with "Dark Victory", "Now, Voyager" and other Bette Davis classics. The DVD features a sharp, clean print, good sound, and the usual entertaining array of short subjects (including a cartoon) that might have been shown with the film back during its original release. August 13, 2007

double occupancy

OLD ACQUAINTANCE is among a handful of Bette Davis films I'd not seen (nor felt compelled to see) before now. Last week I attended a preview of the play upon which the film is based, in a valiant Broadway production of a rather creaky pre-war "sophisticated" comedy, and immediately ordered a DVD of the movie version.

The legendary antipathy off-screen between stars Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins fuels audience appreciation of the on-screen Kit and Millie. Indeed, most discussions of the movie substitute the actresses's names for those of their characters. And indeed their acting styles are so different that they appear to be merely occupying the same film from separate universes. But it's the differences between the stage play and the film that are particularly fascinating.

Almost all the play is radically rewritten for the screen, except for the penultimate scene (now in a taxi) in which Kit helps Millie's daughter understand what it means to be a mature woman.

The play and the movie provide a record of what was considered shocking at the time and how Hollywood reknit controversy into homespun for the Hays Office. In the voiceover commentary, Boze Hadleigh mentions in passing that audiences back in the '40s would expect that a romance between an older woman and a man ten years her junior must fail; but it is precisely this hook that apparently was playwright John Van Druten's central and dominant topic. Since this only takes up the last third of the film, it's easy to see how that's now just a minor plot point.

The original play takes place between Thanksgiving and the New Year in the luxury apartments of Kit and Millie. Kit has just spent the night with her ardent lover (aged 36 on stage and 22 in the film--to make Davis's matronly 42 less ungracious and to explain why her beau isn't apparently in the wartime military when we first meet him). The couple are Manhattan professionals: bright, physically aggressive with each other, and vulnerably in love. No heavy glasses and white-streaked wig (Davis props) suggest that Kit's "older woman" isn't her lover's equal in bed. Their marriage could work.

In Act I, Millie's 18-year-old daughter has been staying with Kit in New York rather than with her own mother in swanky Westchester. The girl staggers in from her date with an older man around nine in the morning, and later confesses that she knows the guy is merely a roue but perhaps he'll make a woman of her. (Not for the Hollywood censors, he won't!) I do agree with director Vincent Sherman that Dolores Moran is not ideal as the daughter. She looks older than even Gig Young, and is taller than both Kit and Millie! But the ingenue virgin is not an easy role to pull off for any actress.

In the play Millie's ex-husband's plan to marry a rival socialite infuriates Millie. Elsewhere she tells Kit outright that she, Millie, always got the goods (husband, daughter, far greater success as a writer) but that Kit always got the real glamour (celebritous love affairs and a reputation as a serious artiste). Millie's raw envy and tinsel attempts to grasp Kit's genuine success combine to make her almost endearing. Inclusion of some of this dialogue from the play might have led to more tolerance toward Hopkins from commentator Hadleigh, but then again he is credited for having written a book about Davis, not about Hopkins.

Millie's ex-husband appears only briefly in the play's second act, when Millie cattily invites him over to smear his fiancee. And the daughter's would-be seducer is mentioned more candidly and more often in the play but is never seen.

The mantra of the women's friendship ("There's always the icing") makes no more sense as a metaphor than the maxim in the play (something about a ladel of cooking fat). And in the play it does not bond them as the wisdom from Millie's mother, but from their childhood cook ... in Negro dialect.

The film version is much livelier by opening up the story to actually play out the youthful friendship, Kit's spurning the advances of her best friend's husband, etc. It's interesting to see so much schtick invented only for the screen, especially in the Twenties section: Kit asleep on the train, the difficulties being photographed, the broken heel, the husband's frequent returns to Kit's bedroom. One wonders how much of this additional material Van Druten himself actually provided.

While the 1940 play concentrates on Kit's sex life and Millie's self-delusion, the movie throws in a hotel house detective who's also a bootlegger. Most variant from the WASPy Phillip Barry sophisticated world of Van Druten's stage show, the wartime movie dutifully promotes patriotic support for the Red Cross ... and almost constant cigarette smoking. But, whatever the decade, Kit and Millie are coifed and dressed in a style contemporary with the Forties. (In a slam at rival Joan Crawford, Davis boasted that she never was filmed wearing oversized shoulderpads; OLD ACQUAINTANCE belies her claim.)

Miriam Hopkins steals the picture in a tremendous feat of comic acting. The voice-over commentary doesn't seem to know this is a comedy. He extols Davis for her constraint as Kit, while dismissing Hopkins as a too vain and B-level star. The play version spells out the "lovable shallowness" of the authoress of potboiler best-sellers, as her daughter and Kit scoff at the middle-aged woman's pretentious gowns, attempts to look younger, and inability to see how ridiculous others consider her to be. (Hadleigh faults Hopkins herself for these excesses.) In the film, Millie's cigarette holder and ostentatious gown for seducing her ex-husband get lost in the general glamour of a Hollywood production. But Hopkins is funny in a manner reminiscent of Carole Lombard, even though she's deprived of the shadings from the play that make the character more sympathetic.

Hadleigh's commentary frequently praises Davis's Kit as an underplayed pillar of tact and wisdom, and opines that no one would marry or stay lifelong friends with the overdone selfish witch that Hopkins limns. In the play, Van Druten points out that "Potboiler" Millie has a cunning for marketing that helps authoress Kit prune the density from HER books. Hadleigh is correct, therefore, to observe that the film all but ignores the authoring bond of these two professional successes, a point he might have citing even more vehemently had he been more familiar with the play version.

It isn't merely that Hopkins's antics are great fun to watch. In Davis's previous film with John Loder, her heroine turns down his marriage proposal with the famous line about not asking for the moon when they've got the stars ... almost as cryptic in actual sense as its cousin about icing, but fun. In OLD ACQUAINTANCE Davis relies on that noble staunchiness for her entire characterization. We've seen it when she dies beautifully in DARK VICTORY and when explaining her husband's heroics to her naive D.C. family in WATCH ON THE RHINE. But here, to me, Davis just comes off as stuffy--a one-note saint. A pleasure to watch, as always, but eclipsed by Hopkins whenever they share the screen.

Hadleigh asks director Vincent Sherman whether Davis sought his advice about how to play the role of Kit. He says she didn't do so until after a couple days of shooting, while he waited for her to raise the matter. (The sign of a not strong director?) When Davis finally did ask him for guidance, what he told her couldn't be more obvious to anyone familiar with the story. Perhaps Wyler or Mankiewicz would have freed Davis to provide a more vinegary subtext.

Curiously, in the current Broadway production Kit's character (and the play) only fully come into their own in the final third. At that time, the Broadway actress playing Kit sells her role by channelling a Bette Davis performance. But better than Davis: the dignified poise and subtle wisdom of a sophisticate, without the faux nobility.

All in all the DVD is a good presentation of this material, though I could only sit through two thirds of the commentary track.

June 9, 2007

Miriam Over the Top

Interesting film, but not one of Bette's best. Miriam Hopkins (much better acting in "These Three" and "The Heiress") eats the scenery every time. Miriam is poorly cast as 20 something, but looks about 50 years old at the beginning of film. Outstanding is Vincent Sherman, the director's interview on the DVD--great insight into the making of the film and personalities of Mim and Bette. March 29, 2007

What Friendship is Really About

Another Classic Bette Davis film, The consumate actress and in this wonderful piece she is joined by another really great actress, Miriam Hopkins.
Together they give true friendship and loyalty a run for their money
Don't miss it. January 5, 2007

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